In recent years, display technology has rapidly developed to satisfy the consumer needs, such as three-dimensional (3D) video imaging, digital cinema resolution, or smart TV that combines regular TV and the Internet. To achieve the requirements of high resolution and high amplitude velocity image, data transmission is critical for the increasingly huge amount of image data being transferred. However, with the requirement of compact-sized products of the display panel, circuitry design on the panel is limited, which affects the transmission quality.
Generally, with a huge amount of data to be transferred, the data can be encoded to increase the bandwidth of data transmission. A typical way of high speed data transmission is to convert the data to be transmitted to encoded multi-level signals. Thus, transmission of the encoded multi-level signals would be more efficient than transmission of the original data. For example, a data with the length of two bits can be encoded or converted to a quaternary level signal, which refers to a signal with 4 different levels. Thus, transmission of the quaternary level signal would be more efficient than transmission of the two bits of the original data. When the receiving terminal receives the quaternary level signal, it can be decoded to obtain the original data with the two bits.
When the encoded multi-level signals are used for data transmission, however, it is difficult to determine each signal level of the multi-level signals. For example, if data with the length of two bits is encoded to the quaternary level signal, which has four different signal levels, the signal stream of the quaternary level signals has no reference to the four different signal levels, and errors may occur if the decoder misjudge one of the signal levels to another. Thus, additional reference voltage can be provided as the reference signal for the multi-level signals, which increases the complexity of the circuitry design.
Further, when encoded multi-level signals are used for data transmission, mapping (encoding and decoding) of the data generally would be one-to-one correspondence. For example, each of the four different signal level of a quaternary level signal corresponds to one of the four combinations of a data with two bits. However, the one-to-one correspondence leaves no space for other command signals, such as clock signaling information, to be transmitted along with the encoded data stream. Thus, additional signals are required for these commands, which increase the complexity of the circuitry design.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.